Books Anyone?
by MoonlightUmbreon
Summary: When writer's block hits, the Ghostwriter reads. But now, not even his library can provide that. Something simply must be done.


**Books Anyone?  
More pointless writing churned out by Moonlight-Umbreon**  


* * *

A hand slid carefully across a shelf, feeling the spines of hundreds of books pass underneath its fingertips. The hand's owner seemed dissatisfied, continuing to direct it to pass over more and more reading material.

"Finished, finished, hack, hack, hack, really bad reviews, finished, not a chance, finished, finished, - oh _God_, how _boring_! Pah!"

The owner of said hand seemed to be able to pick the title of any one book just by feeling the cover, which greatly suggested he'd pulled each and every book in the establishment down at least once and had had a good thumb through it. That and, possibly, he had a kind of psychic understanding of what the books contained. Both were perfectly valid answers.

Finally, he stopped his seemingly fruitless search. His fingertips had found something strange; a new book. He wasn't at all familiar with it, which made the whole situation even weirder. How had it ever made it into his library? He hadn't updated it in a few months, and there'd been no visitors in years. Had he missed it, maybe? Though it was odd for him to miss a book...

With some curiosity, he pulled it down from the shelf to examine the cover. It was rather dusty and old, though otherwise well-kept. All the books in this library were well-kept, though; the Ghostwriter wouldn't have it any other way. If he ever found a book with the pages falling out, he'd mend it without worrying at all about who'd written it or what their actual skill level was. Books always deserved dignity – even if sometimes the stories contained inside didn't.

Other than that, the cover was rather unremarkable, except for the rather nice golden embroidery sown around the edges of the deep blue cover. He liked deep blue; it was the same as Randy's trenchcoat.

However, there wasn't even a title on the front cover, and no words on the back for a blurb. Even on the spine, the Ghostwriter observed, was just blank.

The inside of the thing wasn't much to be excited about either; except for a page somewhere in the middle. It read, "To seek, _first_ you must find."

"Well, that's all very cryptic and probably in some way meaningful," he remarked to no-one in particular. (he was rather used to talking to himself; it wasn't like there was any other company) "but I'm looking for a book of fiction, and these silly little magic books usually end up being quite a lot more trouble than they're worth."

This was quite true. The last magical book that the Ghostwriter had found in his library gave him a nasty flu bug (which he shouldn't have even been able to catch, since living off ectoplasm would make most, if not all viruses die of radiation poisoning almost as soon as they attacked) after completing the first crossword in "The Magical Book of Surprise Crosswords". It took him nearly a month to get over, and he was _still_ sneezing every now and then.

He was halfway through the process of replacing the book on the shelf when he stopped. Perhaps it might actually be _helpful_ in some way? Greatly doubting it though managing to find some mental space, he remembered exactly where the book was before putting it back in its original position.

Deciding that it was highly unlikely that he'd find any more reading material, the Ghostwriter finally settled with updating his outdated library with any new books that had been published over the past few months. He sat down at his keyboard and leaned back in his desk chair, looking upwards at the expanse of books and shelves way above his head.

"I hope the day never comes were the humans stop writing," he murmured almost silently, reaching over behind his shoulder and flicking a button on the keyboard. "It'll make the days where my muse takes a hike even more boring."

Something was wrong, though – the shelves weren't shifting to make room for the new books. In fact, not even the new books were coming. For one not-quite heart-stopping second, (in order for it to be a _real _heart-stopping second, one did first need a heart) the ghost thought he'd just jinxed and rigged what he'd said to _actually happen_. What a relief to him it was when he found that the button on the keyboard was merely jammed.

He tried to tug it free. When that didn't work, he hit the side of it with his hand. And then he kicked it. All to no avail.

"Perfect..." the word was muttered with such discontent that the books almost looked as though shivering, not wanting to be on the receiving end of any anger. They knew the Ghostwriter was always good to them, regardless, though they'd also seen the kind of vindictive fury that could overtake him in a time of extreme anger or frustration.

He drummed his fingers on the surface of the gigantic glass keyboard, trying to figure out what to do. Maybe he could try to dig it out with a screwdriver? ...maybe not, if he still wanted the rest of the thing to work once he was done with it.

What about Technus? Well, no. He wanted his keyboard _back_ after the button was fixed.

Clockwork? What would he know about an reality-bending keyboard? He only knew time...

The Fentons? ...Certainly not. The Ghostwriter decided firmly that he didn't feel like being ripped apart, one molecule at a time, by Jack Fenton's overly-dangerous and inhumane weaponry.

In all honesty, where _was _he supposed to take a machine like this? He'd probably never get such a precious object back if he tried to get it fixed in the Ghost Zone, and if he tried to get it fixed in the human world, he'd probably end up becoming the ghost-equivalent of dead just getting through the portal.

He knew that eventually, the keyboard would just fix itself like it always did. But that often took days – sometimes even weeks, and he wanted it unjammed _now._

"Of all the buttons... it absolutely _must _be hard for me to find a decent book, mustn't it?"

The rest of the library said nothing. But of course, the library, being made up of inanimate objects and _also_ being an inanimate object itself, why would it say something back? Even if it would be immensely helpful if a book screamed out, "I'm here! I'm well-written; read me, read me!!"

What made things even more frustrating was that the keyboard had a few limitations in it's reality-curving abilities; while it did always (eventually) fix itself after any damage, you couldn't force reality to make it fix itself a little faster. It also had one single button to be used for updating the library. It was either use that button, or no button.

The Ghostwriter was becoming increasingly frustrated with the keyboard's picky and stubborn ways. He drummed his fingers again, this time a little harder – if he wanted reading material at the moment, he was going to have to go further than his library to find it. And the Ghost Zone certainly didn't have any other source of books, or at least, not that he knew of...

* * *

**Author's Note  
**I've had writer's block myself lately, and this thing just came into my head... and so I decided to write it.


End file.
